How to Start an Uprising

by Jeff Halper*

April, 2001

First, you create great expectations. Handshakes on the White House lawn. A
rhetoric of peace ("No more war. No more bloodshed"). Elections,
giving them a flag of their own. Then secret meetings, summit meetings, dinners,
retreats, peace treaties, interim agreements, promises, tantalizing benefits
held before hungry eyes. More handshakes, more "gestures."

Then you create a framework of peace that guarantees you negotiating
superiority. Take out international law, human rights covenants, UN resolutions,
and for good measure enlist your strategic ally, the strongest power in the
world, the one who supplies you with all your arms, as the "mediator."

Then, as you talk peace in Oslo, Washington, Paris, Cairo, the Wye
Plantation, Stockholm, Amman, Camp David, Sharm, you "create facts" on
the ground that ensure your continued control and prejudice the negotiations
altogether. You exploit the last seven years since the signing of the Oslo
Accords to

1. Dismember the West Bank into "Areas A, B and C," giving the
Palestinian Authority full control of only 18% of the land while retaining
control over 61%; divide tiny Gaza into "yellow, white, blue and green
areas," giving 6,000 settlers control of 40% of the territory and confining
1,000,000 Palestinians to the rest; and completely sever East Jerusalem from the
wider Palestinian society;

2. Expropriate 200 square kilometers of farm and pasture land from its
Palestinian owners for your own exclusive settlements, highways and
infrastructure;

3. Uproot some 80,000 olive and fruit trees that are in the way of your
construction projects, thereby impoverishing their owners and making them casual
day workers in your labor market -provided they can get access to your labor
market;

4. Add some 30 new settlements, including whole cities like Kiryat Sefer and
Tel Zion, to the dozens of settlements that already exist in the Occupied
Territories over which negotiations are taking place, and construct 90,000 new
housing units in East Jerusalem and the settlements exclusively for your own
population;

5. Demolish more than 1200 homes of the people with whom you are negotiating
peace;

6. Double your settler population across the 1967 border to 400,000, 90% of
which you have already decided will remain under your sovereignty even though
you haven't negotiated that with the other side yet;

7. Begin construction of 480 kms of massive highways and "by-pass"
roads serving your settlements while dissecting the future territory of your
peace partner into tiny disconnected islands, thereby preventing the emergence
of another viable and competing economy next door;

8. Impose a permanent "closure" to prevent those whose lands you
took from finding employment in your own economy, because you have discovered
that workers from Rumania and Thailand are cheaper and more docile. While you're
at it, you also exclude them from entering Jerusalem, the site of their holiest
places;

9. Exploit their natural resources, unilaterally and illegally drawing, for
example, 25% of your country's water from your neighbors' aquifers while leaving
them thirsty for months on end;

10. Vandalize their countryside and environment, burying its fragile historic
landscape under your massive settlements and highways and turning it into a
disposal site for your industrial and urban wastes.

Next, you wait until your occupation has become irreversible and
all-encompassing, until you've integrated your two economies under your control,
the electrical grids, the highway and urban infrastructure, until you've
completely absorbed your partner's economy and society into your own. Then you
announce that your concept of peace is "separation," and you lock your
neighbors into a few small islands, taking away any hope they have for a better
future, for a real country and identity of their own. You keep tightening your
control, restricting their life space, humiliating and harassing them - until
the uprising finally explodes.

Then you tell your story to the world: how you tried to negotiate, how
"generous" you had been, how you wanted peace, and how disappointed
you feel that "they" let you down. How "they"

met your good intentions with stones, how "they" are not partners
for peace, how "they" are not yet ready for peace. And so, until they
agree to end their violence against you and return to the same negotiating table
that allowed you to construct your matrix of control in the first place, you
resort to force - defensive force, of course, since "they" are the
aggressors. The most up-to-date American weapon systems, snipers, closures until
starvation, clearing thousands of acres of agricultural land, destruction of
hundreds of houses.... Until they get the message.